Jack's left eye opened. He blinked once. His vision was blurry and tilted. His head ached with pain. Thousands of needles of discomfort shot through his skull, red hot. He attempted to move his arms. They didn't move. He frantically tried to lift his legs, also without success.
Jack couldn't see his surroundings. His eyesight was severely damaged at the moment, and he could only detect black broken occasionally by flecks of light that wavered and disappeared. It was eerily tranquil; it reminded him of floating belly-up at the bottom of a lake, looking up through the water at the sunlight piercing the surface. It gave him a momentary sense of peace. That was when he remembered that he couldn't move his body.
He thrashed and twisted-or tried. For all the things he thought he was doing, he could just barely feel that his body stayed completely still. It was as if his brain had been tricked into believing it still had control over him; its connection had been severed, yet it had no knowledge of the fact. Jack certainly did, and it terrified him.
Suddenly he felt a rushing sensation overtake his senses and his head was filled with the sound of roaring water; his face felt it as it fell upon him, cold and invigorating. His nostrils and mouth clogged up with liquid, and he realized the feeling was substantial. He coughed and sputtered and straightened up abruptly-or he would have if he could move. He blinked the water from his eyes and looked around.
He was lying on the ground where he had been only moments ago, it felt. The bodies lay still, decaying. The secret knowledge they held was lost to him. Jack's eyes picked up flies swarming over the piles of blackened corpses. Their feast was enrapturing, macabre and delightful. A small smile crossed his lips as they hungrily gorged upon the people he had once known. The initial shock of their appearance had long since faded, and all trances of the child Jack seemed to be flickered and died away.
With a glance to the side, he discovered why he could not move his limbs. A leather strip held each to the ground around either a wrist or an ankle, fastened down on the ends with large rocks. His mind could not even begin to formulate how they had gotten there. He instead tried again, unsuccessfully, to free himself from the bonds. He fought back a tentative panic that seemed to well up from his toes and took a deep breath. He had to calm down. He had to think. His father had taught him that thought defines a human from a common animal and gives him life; thought enables a man to survive. Therefore Jack lay and thought. Eventually a thought came to him.
Rather than try to dislodge the rocks, he would instead try to slide his hand out from under the leather. The sheer obviousness of the tactic made him feel rather silly for not coming up with it sooner; nevertheless, he began. The sand stung and scraped his skin, yet he continued to pull. He gritted his teeth with frustration and was about to stop in defeat when suddenly the leather moved.
Eyes brightening momentarily, he tugged again, harder. His wrist slid an inch out of the strap, scraping the ground. The satisfaction of victory filled his body. He pulled with renewed vigor, determined to get at least one hand free. He felt it give another centimeter when a flicker of movement caught his eye. A large figure was lurching toward him from the left, gargantuan and foreboding. Jack's eyes could not focus on the figure, causing it to appear all the more sinister. It held what appeared to be a small object in its right hand, grasping it loosely; as the figure neared, he could see that it was a knife. In its left, it gripped the handle of what appeared to be a bucket. The panic returned, faster, gripping him and turning his stomach to jelly. He squeezed his eyes shut and pulled again.
The leather would not budge. After the initial movement, it had remained firmly in the same place. Jack pulled harder and harder, desperate to escape this lonely butchering out in the desert. The vultures would not have him. They would not. He thrashed and kicked, frantic. The figure now stood over him. Tears sprang to his eyes. The hand holding the knife began its descent.
Down it came, melancholy and merciless. With each inch it fell, the air grew hotter and more stifling. Jack's terror was intensified by his ignorance of who this person was. His mother's face flashed before his eyes. He thought of how he had laughed hysterically at the sight of her corpse and an involuntary sob racked his body. How little time he had. How little time he had to reflect and accept his failure of a life. The hand continued to sink as if pushed down by an unseen force; the knife trembled in the specter's grip.
The haze of heat wrapped around Jack like a blanket; the air in front of him shimmered and solidified. He could see shadows wavering at the edge of the figure above him. Its own form seemed to vanish one second and loom over him the next. The tendrils of shadow around it shot out and coiled around him, pulling him into a deathly embrace. He could smell burning. A sudden heat blossomed upon his head and he tried to reach up to feel what it was. He could not.
As the fire consumed his hair and burned his scalp, Jack could also feel a fire within him. It was as cold and black as the void he was soon to enter. Rather than blistering heat, a leeching cold suffused his veins and stilled his heart and he stiffened. The sensation of drowning cold and unbearable hot consumed his every sense. He could smell a blazing bonfire, its smoky scent flowing through his nostrils and stimulating his brain. Underneath was the invigorating, cool smell of mint and evergreen; he knew not how he knew the smell or the name given to it. Both were as inexistent in his life as love.
Still the hand sank, now as if through hot, sticky syrup. Time seemed to move at a fraction of normal time. Jack's raspy, panicked breaths came from his mouth in a misty fog, as though he stood in a frozen forest. Layered upon the smells were tastes: his tongue absorbed burnt meat and snow. Water flowed down his throat and his brain throbbed with the cold sensation. In a second they disappeared, replaced by the dust he swallowed as he lay upon the ground, staring slack-jawed at his executioner.
Rapidly the dark form disappeared; in his mind's eye Jack stood in the midst of a roaring inferno, an elemental of death. His skin blistered and blackened. He roared with pain as the fires consumed every inch of his being. It felt as though his skin were being torn apart and dipped in acid all at once. He felt as though one hundred knives jabbed through him repeatedly and in unison, their blades cutting in another place each time until his flesh fell around him in ribbons. Abruptly blackness filled his vision.
He blinked at suddenly beheld, for the first time he had ever known, a grey blizzard. Snow blew and wind howled around him in a dark, featureless sky. He was lying naked upon the icy ground. The ice bit at his skin like a rabid wolf and spread throughout his entire body. He exclaimed with fear. He began shivering uncontrollably as the cold wind wrapped him in an unforgiving cocoon of pain. He would never be warm again. His body became ice and snow and shattered into a million pieces. The pieces scattered on the wind, as did his mind.
He heard the crackling of the fire. He heard the howl of the snow and wind. He was one with death, the destroyer. He felt pain and yet no pain. He felt terrible unknowing and fear, yet he was accepting. He was resilient. The hand of his new god blotted out the sun, filling his vision, and gave him death. With it came new life.
Jack's eyes opened. His ears and nose opened. His mind opened. He saw colors with vivid intensity and new sounds, even the slightest ones, stood out like gunshots. Reds were like blood and the dusty ground a sea of chaotic hues. His hands scraped across aged wood. The image he saw swayed from movement. He glanced down.
Jack stood steadily at the back of a wagon, his hands softly gripping the frame. It was not his wagon. If it had been, he would have been able to pick out half a dozen familiar scratches along the inside. He was facing away from the wind. The scattered trees on the plain swayed as they were left behind. Jack's auburn hair ruffled in the casual breeze. The scene was silent, yet the turning of the wheels on the rocky ground was a powerful symphony.
After a time, his elevated senses began to fade back to normal. Colors took on a rough, faded look. Sounds became disappointingly difficult to single out. It felt almost abnormal to be normal. He swayed momentarily, glanced to either side, and turned around. What he saw nearly made him fall out of the back of the wagon.
A man sat hunched over in the driver's seat. Tendrils of black mist surrounded his body. A cold, paralyzing fear clutched Jack; his mouth opened involuntarily. Beads of sweat popped out on his face, a sticky, nasty sweat. He took a heavy, leaden step. He took another. The figure seemed not to notice. Jack made to put a tentative hand on the figure's shoulder.
"I've been waiting for you to wake up for a while, Jack." Jack's hand froze inches away, quivering in the air like a maniacal conductor's baton. He sidestepped cautiously around the man to look into his face. His brow furrowed and he quickly took a step back. Jack felt on the top of his forehead for a mark of some sort. He found a thick, swollen welt as wide as his thumb. Snarling, he reached for the man's throat with vicious intensity.
The driver's left arm shot out with lighting speed and intercepted Jack's pitiful attack. Corded muscle tensed in the powerful limb under the skin. The hand attached to the arm snaked around and grabbed Jack's. The boy's hand was shoved away and down to his side. The man's eyes never left the oxen pulling the wagon.
"You've tried and failed with that one before, son." His father's eyes flicked down toward him momentarily. They were filled with sarcasm and derision. "I know you too well. Do not take me for a fool, lest you wish to be one yourself." Jack stood still, utterly shocked. He could not move. His mind was trying to desperately process what he had just seen. This could not possibly be his father, the drunken fool who had tormented him for nine years. It could not.
What struck him most were his father's eyes: they were clear. Utterly clear, they were, devoid of any alcoholic stupor. He had never in all his life seen his father's eyes as they were. Now, without the haze of liquor, they appeared almost identical to Jack's. They reflected such an alien vastness; they contained a terrifying, haunting intelligence. Even more unnerving was his father's speech pattern. Gone was the drawl in his voice; gone were all hints of personality. It was replaced by only a sound, not even a voice to Jack-a vehicle for words.
The man in the seat who could not be his father spoke again. "I can see you are terribly confused. You have been waiting long enough, my son, and so I will begin my tale. Sit next to me." Filled with revulsion and anxiety, Jack could not help but obey. The sound was compelling in a subtle way. It demanded authority without saying so. It was the sort of sound that chills the bones; a dark noise in the night that kills the curious cat. Jack shivered violently despite the miserable heat. The man that could not be his father placed an alien arm around the boy who was not his son's shoulders.
"All you want to know is here to be given to you, Jack. I am fully aware that you do not trust me even as I speak to you. Therefore all I ask is for you to refrain from attacking me again. Open your mind." Jack made no movement to indicate that he was willing to comply. The man nodded to himself and without warning gripped the base of Jack's skull with iron force. The boy stiffened and began thrashing violently to escape the grip; his body was held in place by a single hand. The images began in a crushing wave.
He saw a cow lying dead in the heat. Flies picked at its corpse. A black, unclear figure stood at the edge of the image. The figure flickered and shimmered. The image was replaced by a cloud of dust. As if flying, Jack's eye took him through the dust and into the midst of a great wagon train. His eye showed him people in the wagons. They wore intense, emotionless expressions. Women and children rode in the back. Men drove. They were all dead and stripped of flesh. The dead made their pilgrimage.
He saw six men seated in a dark room. They stood up and shook hands. The image flickered. The men were dead, their tongues lolling out crazily, their bodies slumped drunkenly in their seats. The image flickered again. The men became skeletons. Layers of dust covered everything in the room. Suddenly the walls of the room fell down. Jack's vision expanded in a disconcerting zooming motion and the men became a speck in the midst of cold, endless tundra. Light flooded the vision. The dead made their pilgrimage. The dead held their meetings.
Jack then saw his father in a rocking chair on the porch of a cabin in the woods. He was humming softly to himself. Light flooded out onto the porch from a window that looked into a kitchen. He held two bundles in his lap that he rocked back and forth. They fell to the ground with a soft thump as he stood up and walked into the house. The skeletons in rags grinned up at the sky. The woods became desert. The dead made their pilgrimage, held their meetings, and understood.
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"Jack, stop struggling. You're only making this worse."
His eyes snapped open. He gasped for air, sucking in huge gulps as his vision swam and his eyes watered. The needle came out of his arm, and Jack fell to the side. His father caught him in his left arm and held him there. The man looked into his son's eyes. They were clear and focused.
"What is it, my son? What did they show you?"
And Jack told him. He told him of how he knew, finally who his father was. He told him of the dead, the man of shadow, and his rebirth.
They camped in a small depression where they would be sheltered from the dust. The fire crackled tiredly and the crickets chirped their solemn chorus to their meager audience. Shadows danced across the ground, haunting ghouls of ages long past. Jack and his father sat side by side, nestled against the cruelty of the world. His father's tale took a very long time to tell. Jack was content to listen. He would always be.